Studio Tilt

Hey, we are Studio Tilt! ✨ Studio Tilt, directed by Audrey Desjardins at the School of Art + Art History + Design at the University of Washington, is a design research studio that questions and considers familiar encounters between humans and things. To tilt is to render unsteady, to deviate from the main trajectory, to change perspective. While a seemingly small act, a tilt disorients enough to offer a new frame of reference and to open new imaginative trajectories. We use design as a practice for investigating and imagining alternatives to the ways humans currently live with everyday objects and technologies. Check out our website - link in bio ☺️

We invite applications to the 2026 A-I-R Soft Data and Common Wares, at the University of Washington, Seattle, on the topic of ‘Hyperlocality’. ‘Soft Data and Common Wares’ is an interdisciplinary collaboration between the DXARTS Softlab, run by Afroditi Psarra and Design’s Studio Tilt, run by Audrey Desjardins. Both labs are interested in collecting, archiving, and critically transcoding data from the intimate spaces of the home and the body, and the search for meaningful interpretations. Hyperlocality examines data, networks, and technologies related to matters of closeness and the personal. The hyperlocal might imply working with a very specific dataset, or building technologies that operate in a situated environment, off-the-cloud, or even off-the-grid. We envision multidisciplinary projects that explore the creation of artifacts, materials and interpretative processes. We invite thought-provoking juxtapositions of data that offer critical perspectives and build new vocabularies of commons. We will host two one-month residencies, in Spring 2026. We encourage applications that engage with the student community and we expect residents to host an open-studio and give an artist talk. We envision that in the last week of the residency there will be an on-campus public showing of the work. We offer $7000 total (including honorarium, airfare, and accommodation), shared studio space, access to fabrication equipment, a small budget for materials and an exhibition space. Application deadline: January 31, 2026 Proposed residency dates: April 1 - May 31, 2026 Eligibility: Artists, designers, performers, creative researchers. Open to US citizens only, because of funding constraints. For questions: Afroditi Psarra ([email protected]) or Audrey Desjardins ([email protected]) Link in Bio for application! . . . . #artistresidenyprogram #dxarts #dxartssoftlab #design #studiotilt

🚨 New zine alert! 🚨 I'm excited to share that the fourth zine in the 'Soft Data and Common Wares' collection of zines - an ongoing research project with Audrey Desjardins @audreylacrevette and Studio Tilt @studiotilt.design is now out! This zine was developed in the DXARTS 500 Research Studio class that took place in Spring 2024 and was centered around topics such as (but not limited to) archives, robot disobedience, scores and choreographies, autonomous serves, protests, witchcraft, networks, collaborative methods, phantom technologies, outer space, speculative world building etc. This issue entitled 'Radial Teleographies + Indisciplined Archives' features the work of: Cristina Brambila @cristinabrorrr Eunsun Choi @esc_eunsun_choi Umut Gunduz @umutdemahmut Nicolas Kisic Aguirre @nicolaskisicaguirre Tara Simone Murray Althea Rao @cloudvilll Sadaf Sadri @sadaf.sadrii Maria Thrän @maria.thraen You can find a print copy tomorrow at the Jacob Lawrence Gallery's @jacob.lawrence.gallery Print, Copy, Paste Zine Fest running from 2-8pm! It will be in great company with Eunsun's personal zines and art books :) . . . . . . #softdata #commons #commonwares #researchmethods #zine #dxarts @dxarts #universityofwashington #diypublishing #dxartssoftlab #design #studiotilt #zinefest

I was fortunate to spend last month at the University of Washington’s @dxarts and @studiotilt.design Soft Data and Common Wares art residency 🛜 For one week, I held a speculative workshop titled “Vernacular Clouds.” In this workshop, communication networks were reconsidered from the grassroots, moving beyond corporate data clouds and monopolistic service providers. Participants outlined the nodes of a personal, autonomous grassroots network and synthesized it into Midjourney prompts. How might the nodes of a network emerge from local knowledge systems and material culture? We aimed to use Midjourney not to speculate an impossibly distant future, but to ‘mine the near present.’ 1 A diasporic web server enmeshed in a family heirloom from Colima, Mexico, containing oral histories — Mark 2 A community library with a server where people can share downloadable versions of books that may be hard to find in print — Tara 3 A server made of yarn, situated in the cave high up in Mount Zas in Naxos, connecting plant life, animals, villages, farms, soil, sand, sea, and the artifacts of local artisans — Afroditi Psarra 4 A server in a grey van parked in the Heather Meadows, connecting people with the mountain, the trees and the moss, the whiskey jack birds and the brown squirrels — Audrey Desjardins 5 A server entangled with tree roots, tied to a wooden street lighting, networking non-human agents, sounds, and stories of the environment — Cristina Brambilla 6-7 A server inside a community refrigerator located in a candy shop in Lake Tahoe with people, trash and food, holding a party — Sadaf 8 A magical item from an RPG world sits within a statue as a node. Gamers surround the item, connecting their signature items to log in and gain oracular insights — Umut 9 A server situated in a heart implant given to a 93-year-old who requires a wheelchair and is navigating through her senior living facility options — Althea 10 Web servers situated in a drag house, where furniture, clothes, and data is accumulated in the ballroom community— xiaowei These works were part of my show, Looking in a Circle, in a Circle of Clouds.

I feel extremely grateful to have been able to co-facilitate the artistic residency 'Soft Data and Common Wares' this year at the DXARTS Softlab together with Audrey Desjardins from @studiotilt.design , and in this context organize the show 𝐋𝗼𝗼𝐤𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐂𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐥𝐞, 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐂𝐢𝐫𝐜𝐥𝐞 𝗼𝐟 𝐂𝐥𝗼𝐮𝐝𝐬 by Mark A. Hernandez Motaghy @markanthony.hm 🙌🏼 Mark is a Boston-based artist and cultural worker, as well as the co-founding director of Fortunately Magazine, and they work between architecture, urbanism, art, and new media. Mark spent a month among our labs, talked about their research and organized a speculative design workshop on Vernacular Clouds. During their residency, Mark focused on the project 𝑺𝒆𝒓𝒗/𝒊𝒓; a transmedia exploration consisting of video, sculpture, and poetry that creates a diasporic server between Montebello, California, and Colima, Mexico. This work opens questions about family heirlooms, oral histories, diaspora politics, hardware, and craft. The snippets from their show at the DXARTS gallery depicted here, explore the social and material intra- and inter-relations within DIY networks hosted on a local server. The title of the show originates from Trinh T. Minh-Ha's self-reflexive notion of looking 'in a circle of gazes,' considering how to register the past and present in resistance to Western logic. Through the lens of such autonomy and self-representation, the work delves into the self-reliance of community networks and their role in stewarding personal/collective archives. Mark crafts an intergenerational family web server, and participants from the DXARTS 500 class speculate on situated servers of various scales, expanding our possibilities of becoming multi-nodal in the network of our desires. . . . . . . . . #dxarts #design #universityofwashington #artistinresidence #softdata #commonwares #commons #server #oralhistories #diaspora#diasporicserver #politics #vernacularcloud #hardware #craft #heirloom #servilleta #dweb #alternativenetworks #feministserver #archiving

For the past month the DXARTS Softlab and UW Design's Studio Tilt @studiotilt.design had the opportunity to host Xiaowei Wang @xrwang88 for an artistic residency in the context of the S̅o̅f̅t̅ D̅a̅t̅a̅ a̅n̅d̅ C̅o̅m̅m̅o̅n̅ W̅a̅r̅e̅s̅ project. Xiaowei worked on the project 𝖂𝖎𝖙𝖈𝖍 𝕱𝖊𝖛𝖊𝖗 a research based art project at the intersection of climate crisis, colonialism and violent beauty. The project elegantly combines printed textile pieces, speculative botany, textiles as archives, colonial histories, and practices of repair. During their time with us Xiaowei focused on crafting two aprons with embroidered speculative patterns using a stainless steel cotton conductive and magnetic thread. Each pattern is then magnetized to a certain polarity in order to store binary information that can later be retrieved using a magnetometer. Here are the garments that Xiaowei created as part of the 🌱 𝕌𝕟𝕔𝕒𝕟𝕟𝕪 𝔾𝕒𝕣𝕕𝕖𝕟 🌱show at the UW Biology Greenhouse last week. So thrilled to have been able to facilitate this residency with Audrey Desjardins and to have Xiaowei with us 🙏🏼 . . . . . . #dxarts #design #uwbiologygreenhouse #universityofwashington #softlab #studiotilt #artistinresidence #xiaoweiwang #softdata #commons #commonwares #decolonialhistories #speculativedesign #botany #etextiles #digitalembroidery #conductivethread #archiving #technofeminism

👀 Artists in Residence announcement! ‘Soft Data and Common Wares’ is an interdisciplinary collaboration between Dxarts SoftLab (@afrdt ) and Studio Tilt. We are interested in the process of collecting, archiving, and critically transcoding data from the intimate spaces of the home and the body, and the search for meaningful interpretations. As part of this project, this Spring 2024 we are hosting two one-month artist residencies. The two artists were selected through an open call which received an astounding 80 proposals from artists around the globe. The goal is to engage the two visiting artists in conversations with DXARTS and Design students and colleagues. Xiaowei R. Wang, @xrwang88 , a California-based artist, writer, organizer and coder, will work on the project Witch Fever during mid-April to mid-May. Witch Fever is a research based art project at the intersection of climate crisis, colonialism and violent beauty. The project elegantly combines printed textile pieces, speculative botany, textile as archive, colonial histories, and practices of repair.  Mark A. Hernandez Motaghy, @markanthony.hm , a Boston-based artist and cultural worker, as well as the co-founding director of Fortunately Magazine, will focus on the project Serv/ir from mid-May to mid-June. Serv/ir is a transmedia exploration consisting of video, sculpture, and poetry that creates a diasporic server between Montebello, California, and Colima, Mexico. This work opens questions about family heirlooms, oral histories, diaspora politics, hardware, and craft. This residency program is supported by a Kreielsheimer/Jones Grant from the Arts Division of the College of Arts and Sciences. 📷 images by Xiaowei R. Wang and Mark A. Hernandez Motaghy #artresidency #data #dataart #softdata #ixd #dxarts #design @uwsoa @dxarts

Party time 🥳 At the end of Spring Quarter, we hosted an Inner Ear party where the participants of the study could meet with each other, the team at Studio Tilt, and Timea Tihanyi @sliprabbitstudio . We all learned more about the making of the Inner Ear, the motivations behind the project, and the experience of living with the Inner Ear. Thanks @oceanvu_ @jrsaimo and @wyattolson.jpg for the photos 📸 #dataphysicalization #data #designresearch #3dprintedceramics #3dprintedclay #designprocess #gardenparty #RtD

𝕊𝕠𝕗𝕥 𝔻𝕒𝕥𝕒 𝕒𝕟𝕕 ℂ𝕠𝕞𝕞𝕠𝕟 𝕎𝕒𝕣𝕖𝕤 ℂ𝕒𝕝𝕝 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝔸𝕣𝕥𝕚𝕤𝕥 ℝ𝕖𝕤𝕚𝕕𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕤 𝟚𝟘𝟚𝟛-𝟚𝟜 ‘Soft Data and Common Wares’ is an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between the DXARTS Softlab (e-textiles and wearable technology lab run by Afroditi Psarra in DXARTS) and Studio Tilt (interaction design research studio run by Audrey Desjardins in Design). The collaboration probes the connections between working with data-driven approaches and crafting physical artifacts, and examines the intimate spaces of the home and the body, and the assistive and affective technologies they engage with. Both labs are interested in the process of collecting, archiving, and critically transcoding data from the intimate spaces of the home and the body, and the search for meaningful interpretations; they use material experimentations and prototyping as techniques to shape social identities and create intellectual and cultural commons.  🔗🔗 🔗sign🔗 𝕋𝕙𝕖 ℝ𝕖𝕤𝕚𝕕𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕤 We invite artists to join us in our conversations on diverse topics such as: the non-neutrality of data, algorithmic bias, digital labor, the invisible infrastructures of data collection, gender and the body, networks, methods, sonic technologies, interpretative nature of data, and earth + space + body. The goal is to create connections (between people, projects, and spaces) and build a vocabulary of commons. We envision projects that explore the creation of artifacts, materials and processes of any medium (multidisciplinary practices encouraged). We will host 2 residencies (1 month long). Residencies will take place in Spring 2024 (starting April 1st until June 30th). Proposals are due: October 1st, 2023 Decisions sent out: November 1st, 2023 We offer:  •Shared studio space  •Access to fabrication equipment •A small budget for materials  •Exhibition space •$3000 honorarium •Travel funding •Accommodation funds 𝕃𝕚𝕟𝕜 𝕚𝕟 𝕓𝕚𝕠 𝕗𝕠𝕣 𝕞𝕠𝕣𝕖 𝕕𝕖𝕥𝕒𝕚𝕝𝕤 𝕒𝕟𝕕 𝕒𝕡𝕡𝕝𝕚𝕔𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 𝕗𝕠𝕣𝕞 . . . #opencall #artistresidency #universityofwashington #dxarts #soa #dxartssoftlab #studiotilt #criticaldata #prototyping #researchmethodology

We are excited to be presenting at the Designing Interactive Systems (DIS) conference this week! Stop by on Wednesday, July 12th to hear about our pictorial “A Notebook of Data Imaginaries,” which has received an Honorable Mention Award. This collection of illustrations is based on our two year long project, Data Epics. #dis2023 #data #dataepics #dataimaginaries #illustration #designresearch

Six households in Seattle, WA volunteered to capture and feel the vibrations of their homes with the Inner Ear. Capturing and sharing how participants might experience a research project is challenging. Over the last months, we interviewed, filmed, and created a series of short documentary films that attempts at sharing participants’ experiences with the Inner Ear. We learned a lot about the pressures and uncertainties of filming, and the responsibility of building narrative through editing. We present some of these lessons in a Work-In-Progress Poster at the ACM DIS 2023 conference this week! Come and chat with @bassibet , @wyattolson.jpg and Audrey Desjardins during the Wednesday night reception! 🎥The videos will be on our website. Coming very soon! #dataphysicalization #data #designresearch #3dprintedceramics #3dprintedclay #designprocess #documentary #filmmaking #workinprogress #dis2023

Thrilled to share that after a year of research with dearest friend and collaborator Audrey Desjardins @audreylacrevette we are launching our first collection of zines under the topic of 𝗦𝗼𝗳𝘁 𝗗𝗮𝘁𝗮 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗺𝗼𝗻 𝗪𝗮𝗿𝗲𝘀. The zines are going to be part of the DIY Methods conference organized by the Low Carbon Research group at Trent University in Canada. 🔗/🔗 ‘Soft Data and Common Wares’ is an ongoing interdisciplinary collaboration between the DXARTS Softlab (e-textiles and wearable technology lab run by Afroditi Psarra in DXARTS @dxarts ) and Studio Tilt @studiotilt.design (interaction design research studio run by Audrey Desjardins in Design @_uwdesign ) at the University of Washington, Seattle, USA. We are interested in the process of collecting, archiving, and critically transcoding data from the intimate spaces of the home and the body, and the search for meaningful interpretations. We use material experimentations and prototyping as techniques to shape social identities and create intellectual and cultural commons. This project reflects on the hybridizations of bodies, materials and world-building narratives and the dissemination of such research. Stay tuned, as we'll be launching an open call for two artistic residencies in the near future for people to join us in developing this research project even further. More zines, and hopefully an open publication to come in the future... Very grateful for the Collaborative Studio grant from the Simpson Center for the Humanities @simpson_center and the Kreilshemer and Jones Large Grant from the College of Arts and Sciences at UW which allowed us to work on this research project. . . . . . . . . #diymethods #diypublication #zines #fanzines #lowcarbonresearchmethods #softdata #commons #IoT #wearables #technofeminism #research #DXARTS #dxartssoftlab #studiotilt #universityofwashington